Beyond LinkedIn: Integrating Major Social Networks Into Your B2B Strategy

When it comes to B2B social media marketing, LinkedIn has been the network of choice for a long time now (and understandably so). But if you haven’t considered the potential of other large social networks like Twitter and Facebook in attracting B2B leads and moving them down the sales funnel, you could be missing out on a huge opportunity.

Facebook and Twitter offer a great deal of value when utilized correctly. But for purposes of B2B marketing, you must have consistent B2B marketing recruitment, a strong vision from your leadership, and talented social media staffing to extract meaningful ROI.

Laying the Foundation for Remarketing

Twitter and Facebook are frequently overlooked when it comes to B2B, often viewed as throw-away networks. However, they can quickly become one of your most valuable if your team makes full use of their full functionality.

The first step to making the most of Facebook and Twitter is optimize your business’s profiles with proper branding, messaging, and organic posts. Make sure your social media management team maintains an active organic social presence by scheduling future posts with a tool like HubSpot or Hootsuite. Once this is taken care of, your social pages won’t look like a ghost town and your audience will be more inclined to take you seriously.

The second step is to set up a remarketing tag on your website if you don’t have one already. Create the tags in the Facebook and Twitter ads platforms and install them in the header of your website. The whole process should only take about five minutes for any web development staffing that knows what they’re doing.

Now that you have those tracking pixels on your site, you’ll begin capturing your website visitors so that you’re able to remarket to them at your strategic convenience. Now your ads can appear their Facebook newsfeed and Twitter streams after they’ve visited your site.

Locked on Target

Most B2B interaction involves long sales cycles, so instead of pushing for a hard sale on the first interaction, you should work on building the relationship with your clients. You do this by sending them back to your site as much as possible to increase exposure to the content you’ve created.

One of the most basic—and most effective—such campaigns is a standard blog promotion campaign. To do this you create a campaign that targets your website’s visitors, and set the ads you place on social networks to be posts about your latest blogs. Make sure to include a handful of different posts at any given time so that your audience gets a healthy variety, and update the campaign regularly to ensure that your latest blogs are being featured.

Your team can also create a campaign that encourages the customer to download your latest whitepaper, attend your upcoming webinar, or whatever else your content marketing staffing has been working on lately. All of these requests have a low barrier to overcome and will typically be well-received as long as they’re high quality.

Both Facebook and Twitter have a feature that allows your marketing analytics staffing to upload lists of emails into their system, and they’ll match those emails to the user accounts they’re associated with. If the emails are business email addresses and not personal addresses you can expect a 30-60% connection rate.

If you have a well-developed database containing several thousand emails, that still makes for a decent sized audience. And the best part about a custom audience built with email addresses is that it targets the customer based on their account and not on their device (like tracking cookies do). This means that the customers in your custom audience will see your ads on their mobile devices. And with over 80% of Facebook users accessing their accounts via mobile and a similar number on Twitter, it’s essential that you are able to have your message appear properly on mobile.

A very informative guide to creating personas for social media marketing

By using this information, you’re able to discover what content and messages best engages these individuals. And that’s the key to B2B marketing– engagement. You want to engage your customers and give them something of value. One great tool to discover what’s resonating with your customers is BuzzSumo. It allows you to find the articles and content that are being shared the most by your target audience.

Developing and Distributing Content

Now that you have your targeting system established, you know who your customers are, and your campaigns set up, you’ll want to start feeding your audiences your content. Social media has quickly become a content curation tool for most users. Instead of going to their favorite websites or searching for topics to read, most of today’s internet users stumble upon content that is recommended by their social network. In fact, social media now accounts for over 30% of traffic going to sites and that number is likely to continue growing.

To effectively engage with your customers, you’ll need to remove your marketing hat for just a moment and put on your editorial hat. Using the data you gathered in previous stages, you’ll want to have your content marketing staffing team producing blog posts, videos, eBooks, whitepapers, webinars, and dozens of other types of content that are all centered on the topics you know your customers care about and will have them coming back for more.

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